About the Image(s)

This is an image from a recent six-week vacation to Ireland. We had driven part of the Ring of Kerry about a week earlier and had stopped at a place called Ladies View, which apparently was a favorite spot of Queen Victoria. Unfortunately the weather was rainy and foggy so there was not much to see. We decided to come back when the weather was better. This image was taken on our return visit.

The image was taken on a Pixel 9 using the built-in camera app using the automatic settings and selected the optical 1x zoom lens. Post processing was done in Photoshop 2025. I did some preliminary exposure and vibrance adjustments with a light dehaze to the image in Camera Raw.

I saw a video recently on the perceived sharpness of images. The gist of the video was an image can appear soft, even on the best gear with everything in focus if the shadows have a gradient. The recommendation was instead of using sharpening to correct this, use increased contrast, which will not appear as crunchy as using sharpening.

I used two sets of selectively masked contrast/brightness adjustment layers to see how this worked out.

I needed to correct a halo that was visible between the sky and the mountains using the healing brush.

I added a 6% warming filter to the entire image, which I thought looked a little too cool.

Finally, I cropped the image into a 16:9 format.

When I resized the image for submission, I noticed that the default resize made the image considerably more sharp, to the point of looking overprocessed. I selected the bilinear option for resizing which lessened the effect. The image is sized at 1920x1080.